This call for papers is for a proposed panel to be held at (dis)junctions, the University of California, Riverside's 15th AnnualHumanities Conference, which will be on April 11-12, 2008. This year'stheme is â€œWhere the Streets are Re-Named.â€

In the current era of literary scholarship, we pride ourselves on havingexpanded the canon beyond the â€œold dead white menâ€ that were (nearly) thesole focus of past generations of scholars. Growing numbers ofuniversity programs, academic journals, and individual scholars, however,are working to increase awareness of women, minority, and GLBT writersand their works, but certain other works and/or their creators still gounnoticed. Very little criticism appears about the â€œminorâ€ works ofwidely acclaimed and recognized writers like William Faulkner (Light inAugust) or John Barth (Sabbatical), but even more importantly, sometimesâ€”despite our claims of toleranceâ€”the literary community turns against orforgets some of its most brilliant members. Mark Helprin, whose workshave received the Penn-Faulkner Award, a Guggenheim, the Prix de Rome,and have been nominated for a National Book Award, is rarely taught andmore rarely written about because, it seems, of his politicallyconservative bent.

This panel, then, seeks papers that consider writers, whether fiction ornon-fiction, and works that have been ignored by scholars or that havefallen off the radar of contemporary scholarshipâ€”works that you considerworthy of attention but that have failed to receive it of late. Whilenot seeking to focus on matters of canon formation, the following aresome possible topics: